The Slow Death of Dump and Chase Hockey

This is another great read for youth hockey coaches and youth hockey parent from the legendary Jack Blatherwick.

The best analogy in all these articles is to imagine a basketball coach screaming “pass it to the other team and defend”. How silly does that sound? That’s hockey coaching at the U-10 level some days?

If you really want your kid to be good:

1- play 1/2 ice early and often.

2- find a coach who doesn’t care about winning

3- find a coach passionate about offense who will tolerate mistakes

I have a friend in an NHL front office who said “we only draft offensive players. We can make offensive players into defensive players with good coaching in the minors but we can never make defensive players into offensive players”.